Wallace Pato: Prenúncio de Alento: Curatorial Text: Keyna Eleison

There is an ancestral alliance in his practice that understands living not merely as resistance, but as a continuous elaboration of pleasure, beauty, and dignity. Wallace paints as one who seeks to spiritually reorganize the space around him. His paintings function as emotional rehearsals of a possible world. Looking at his canvases, one can understand both what the world is and what it could become.

To reach either a full or definitive happiness? — perhaps he himself knows it is never offered whole — but to construct images capable of bringing bodies closer to what they desire to feel.

It is precisely in this movement that his work crosses boundaries between space-time, between the concrete and the transcendental. Scenes profoundly mundane — human presence, the street, music, intimacy — yet everything also seems suspended by a spiritual dimension that has no name yet. Invisible continuities painted… In his images, ancestry is understood as a technology of permanence, as a force that moves through time to project emotional futures still unfinished. His painting transforms the everyday into a portal, making the act of imagining a radical form of remaining alive.

There is a long tradition in the history of painting that understands the canvas as an opening: a surface capable of tearing through the immediate limits of the world and offering other ways of perceiving existence. In Wallace Pato, that tradition reappears displaced by suburban experience, by popular musicality, and by the affective dimension of collective life. His paintings operate as windows, rupturing the classical sense of faithful representation of an external landscape. What they open is a field of sensibility. Looking at his canvases, one enters an image, an emotional frequency, an atmosphere where imagining ceases to be abstraction and becomes concrete experience of seeing.

There is something contemplative in his painting that, even when it might impose distance, draws closer. The canvases expand those who observe them because they seem to allow each person to recognize desires, memories, and states of mind that they have often forgotten, or been made to forget in daily life. His images align with meanings; they breathe alongside the public. What might once have existed as dream, intuition, or delirium takes on matter, color, and presence. And in taking on presence, it moves those who contemplate it. Wallace paints as a device for amplifying life: a poetic technology capable of making one see.

And here, the matter of solace… Rest? Peace? A promise of healing that reorganizes the world again?

There is something profoundly radical in the way Wallace Pato understands solace. In his practice, it appears almost as a state of vertigo: a necessary delirium for staying alive. A daily invention produced by communities and agreements that operate to transform precariousness into rhythm, exhaustion into celebration, and lived experience into knowledge.

His painting is born of this intelligence that knows the harshness of life alongside the subtle and explosive construction of joy. A joy — at times improvised — like composing after the end of the day, like one who writes poetry comfortably sat side by side with banality, like one who dances knowing the weight of the days. There is music in his canvases because there is pulse. There is poetry because his images always seem to carry something that escapes direct description: an atmosphere, a refrain, a memory too warm to be organized by reason alone.

Wallace Pato paints living and being alive as one who insists on delicacy. Nothing emerges to illustrate the everyday, but to expand it emotionally. There is a refusal to accept that life be reduced to violence or lack. What his work offers is another grammar: that of encounter, of desire, of the sensuality of presence, of the beauty born among friends, music, loves, streets, drinks, backyards, and excesses that make life.

The delirium of solace perhaps lies precisely there: believing it is possible to produce warmth in a world that continually cools bodies.

And then, we understand that today we are. Past, present, and future.

Finally,
the dragonfly can cease to be a word
and alights

Keyna Eleison
2026